Slashdot Mirror
Keyboards are Good; Mouses are Dumb
An anonymous reader writes "Most emacs/vi users know this, but it seems the more I use the mouse, the less output I am making. The keyboard does seem to make much more of a mind-meld than the imprecise mouse. Paul Tyma hits it on the head."
Let the editor wars begin!
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...when did opinions become news??
...Counterstrike.
I've tried it. Absolutely impossible.
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
Imagine trying to use a CAD program, or even browse a web-forum without a mouse. The mouse still wins in some applications.
(Didn't RTFA).
Use Illustrator and only your keyboard. Go!
I agree completely. The mouse is imprecise and takes too long, requires very good hand/eye coordination. When I have to work on a repetitive task I can either write a macro or have the exact sequence of key-strokes down and do the job much faster.
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The mouse is better when the datasets that you are working on are not localized / scattered around the screen (it's like a cassette tape vs. cd-rom which can quickly access random parts of data without rewinding)
--
ahref=http://unk1911.blogspot.com/http://unk1911.
Can you imagine how many times I would have had to hit 'tab' just to get to this textarea if I only had a keyboard and was using w3m or something? I shudder at the prospect.
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
Hits it on the head..
This page cannot be displayed due to an internal error.
..and apparently knocks it out.
air and light and time and space
They could read http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mouse_vs._k eyboard/index.html
for counter arguments. Ofcourse, as the tty/line based input interfaces on *nix, the mouse might do that much for applications such as vim/emacs as they are today.
I'm impressed how those guys can use the keyboard to rotate around and zoom 3D graphics in realtime, and then apply some amazing pixel-sharpening processing algorithm, all by using keyboard commands.
I've often wondered how they could do this so quickly. Especially when they literally have to type everything they want into a text field on the screen. For example, "search for drivers license of all bad guys within last two days".
I mean, it's a search engine - you don't have to type "search" into the text field!!!
Articles : Mom, I think I'm a Cyborg
Posted by paul on 2005/5/20 9:24:00 (1328 reads)
Keyboards are good. Mouses are dumb.
If I was an alien looking to slowdown the technological advancement of the human race, I would have implanted into their society the things we call the keyboard and the mouse. In fact, the only personal proof I have that this was not the case is if aliens were involved they would have updated the pain by now. Like making the "shift" key a foot pedal or something.
Assuming mailicious aliens weren't involved, this isn't good news. It means we were silly enough to have invented these things ourselves. And then we were silly enough to let them "catch on". And we're silly enough to not personally diverge to a more efficient invention just in case we might later still need to know how to use this one. We humans follow a frighteningly simple herd mentality, God forbid someone jumps off a cliff and yells "free USB fobs!" - we'd be goners.
Truth is however, that with the keyboard at least - we have adapted. Our brains and fingers have optimized this abomination enough to actually get decent output. Obviously, the optimal tool would be one that can output words (actually, getting rid of words and going right to thoughts would be way better, but that is as of yet - out of scope) as fast as we can think them.
Now you might actually have been thinking the opposite. That the mouse is the more precise tool of the two. Well not for me it isn't. For artists and graphic manipulators the mouse is all that and a bag of chips - but for text people like myself, you can keep your seedy mice.
The problem with mice (which the nefarious aliens know all too well) is that its use removes your hand from the keyboard. To open a file in your favorite editor, chances are you grab the mouse, find the pointer with your eyes, move it to "file", click, move it down to "open" (hopefully not having to deal with any of those sub-menus that always seem to unpop off my screen as I'm moving down trying to get a lower entry) and once again click.
The alternative way to do this using just the keyboard (which I'm callously assuming is where your fingers already are) is to hold ALT, press F, let go of both, then hit O (thats as in "oh", not zero).
I have never written down all those operations before now and just looking at the two makes me feel stupid to have every used a mouse to open a file. The ALT-F method is no secret - why the heck don't we use it? ALT-F then O is even two different hands - it really is quite fast. My only explanation is that such keystrokes are cryptic and will require a bout or two of memorization whereas the peachy mouse-menu route hand-holds us right along the way. The mouse cursor gives us a constant bookmark of where our thought process is "I just clicked the file menu - now I'm moving to click open".
There is a nice book by Andy Clark called Natural Born Cyborgs. He makes an interesting observation that we all are already cyborgs (loosely defined as a fusion of humans and technology). His example is that if I am at your house, I may ask you "Do you know what the word poikilotherm means?". If you don't you would say "No, but we can look it up!". Upon consulting your house dictionary or your ubiquitous wifi connection, you can easily do that.
Now similarly, I might ask "Do you know what time it is?". And, at the very instant of me asking, you may not. However, the common response is to raise your wrist to your face and say "Yeah, its 4:30".
You liar. YOU did not know. Your watch knew but took credit for its perpetual temporal omniscience. I always know what time it is cuz dadburnit - I have a watch! In effect, we have extended our concept of self to include our watches - thus in Dr. Clark's claim we are cyborg. (Note that grammatically speaking, that sentence should end in "cyborgs", not "cyborg" - but if you ever watched Star Trek you'd know that cyborgs don't use contractions and often speak of th
I believe Fox News was founded in 1980.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
And you just confused the smurf out of every Mac zealot going to this story to denounce the heresy of the superiority of the keyboard.
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
I got a computer to let my mouse surf the 'Net. What am I supposed to tell my mouse when he reads this article, you insensitive clod?
:wq
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
Try using photoshop without a mouse.
Or maybe, the correct answer here, like in every field, is USE THE PROPER TOOL FOR THE JOB.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Most people feel that way, and I certainly do as well, but many usability studies have been done and for menu based commands the mouse is faster than arrow keys and drop menus.
If what we are talking about is hot keys, then there is some speed gain, but I have found that for most select cut and paste operations (even in text editors) the mouse/hot key combination seems to be fastest.
Oh and the article is already down.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
He is sinply assuming that all anybody ever does is navigate file menus and some word processing. Choosing icons from a desktop, clicking buttons, things like that are not just eye candy... they matter. And for the things I do, multimedia editing and stuff, the mouse is more than essential. I agree fully with the poster that pointed out this is a thinly veiled 3 emacs news item, and rather terrible news. HEY, GEE GUYS, KEYBOARDS ARE BETTER THAN MICE FOR WORD PROCESSING.
webpage
While both have cords, mice lend themselves to seconday use as garottes due to the small size of the mouse, espcially mini USB models for laptops. Keyboards meanwhile have a definite edge as a blunt instrument, able to focus the full power along one edge or to spread the impact across the face of the bottom, or even cause the embedding of key shrapnel.
Other than these thoughts, WTF? is definitely going through my mind as in "WTF is this article for anyhow? Should be kiss Gnome and KDE goodbye and go back to text where we can commune with our keyboards? Should we do everything by mouse in a gui to strike back? Does this article have any point to it?
Now... back to the real uses of keyboards and mice...
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I do not wish vi to be seen so close to emacs lest someone think they are together. vi wouldn't be caught dead with the likes of emacs... the after prom party doesn't count there had been much drinking
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
This is pretty unlikely. There are a number of reasons why touch screens and eye input are inaccurate:
1. Your finger has very low resolution. You cannot position something very precisely with a finger on the screen no matter how sensitive the touch screen is.
2. Sticking your finger on the screen obscures your view of the very thing you are trying to point to thus making it harder.
3. Tracking your eyes suffers from a similar accuracy problem. Just try staring at a pixel on the screen and then move your eyes just enough to move exactly one pixel to the right.
The mouse is a good tool for precise positioning on screen because your hand can make very precise movements.
Next time you are undergoing surgery try asking the surgeon to direct the scalpel with his eyes.
John.
They're stupid. As a matter of fact, GUIs are stupid too. So are command lines. If you're a REAL geek, you'll do your computer work with a punch card. If it can't be done with that, well, it must not be worth doing.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
I thought this argument died in the 80's.
jfs
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Because mice would have been the smart way.
So rather than being a general case study with broad applicability, Slashdot has just put on its front page an article that says, "I like keyboards!"
Somehow, "News for one particular nerd" just doesn't have the right ring.
Slow news day, here we come.
Let me lay it out for you nice and simple. If you choose to use tools that work best with a keyboard then the keyboard will be most efficient. If your tool works better with mouse input then a mouse will be more effiecient.
Try using a keyboard exclusively with Photoshop. Oops!
The tool you use dictates the hand action.
Using the best knowledge of today to create the problems of tomorrow.
TFA only uses typing as the example of interacting with the computer, in this case, with text editors and using the keyboard shortcut instead of using the mouse and clicking on File-Save. His article works great in this sense, because the keyboard is naturally the most effective tool for the task of typing.
However, it takes little to no tweaking of his "Cyborg" argument to say that mice are superior when using CAD and playing most computer games. After a certain duration at any of these activities, the mouse simply becomes an extension of the human body, and little to no thought is required for our brains to act immediately to what we want to do on the computer, be it dodging a rocket or designing an object.
Keyboards and mice are not inherently dumb or smart, each is simply more adept at different tasks.
Most input from human to computer is digital - selecting from a menu of items; selecting a particular window; clicking OK; entering text, etc.
Some input is analog - like drawing a picture. Some is analog but maybe gratuitously so - like dragging or resizing a window.
Mice are great for analog input, and not so great for digital.
So why are mice used so much? Because it is easy to train primates to whack the right paddles to perform certain well-defined tasks. Not because such an interface is most efficient for an adept user.
It is true that Windows has a hideous alternate digital input method using tab and enter. That's equivalent to unary.
It is not clear to me that *any* current keyboard input convention is as efficient as it might be. Certainly not Emacs, which makes you escape the ordinary thing you do (navigating) in order to facilitate something you do less often (inserting stuff at a new place).
All these ergonomic issues are amenable to evaluation by experiment, but the easy-to-implement experiments all involve short learning periods and previously unexposed subjects. Or, worse still, subjects who have already been exposed to a particular way of doing things. Such naive experiments will tend always to support "use a mouse, just like Windows."
We're comparing shovels to screwdrivers here, folks.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
You know, I think he might be on to something. When I click on the link in the article with my mouse, nothing happens!
I read Usenet for the articles.
...then we'll have something to debate.
Ruger
This kind of reminds me of WordPerfect 5.1, where you could do everything with one of Alt,Ctrl,Shift, and the function keys. Once you mastered all the functions, or all the common ones, operating in WordPerfect was very quick. I know my highschool had labels on the top of every keyboard that had all the shortcuts there. Made them a lot easier to memorize. You could probably still set up a word processor like this if you took the time, but who wants to do that.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
display -dither -despeckle -gamma 1.8 -sharpen 2 0.5 thisSecretImage.jpg
...and I'm essentially done. Takes less time to type that than opening the damn download program, and the "interface" is just as usable (at least it is to me).
I do that stuff all the time. I stopped using windows altogether about two years ago, every day I still find myself using the GUI less and less. Sure some things are irreplaceable, but for most stuff -- I want to download an image gallery? I can waste five minutes setting up a download in d4x or I can type something like
for ALL in `seq -w firstvar lastvar`;do wget http://somesite/gallery/DSC$ALL.jpg;done
And yes, I DO use my system for video editing and photography work. I still long for Gimp to have the keyboard-ability of the SGI/Wavefront system I learned to use more than a decade ago.
The apple, option(alt) and control keys are used quite a bit in situations where a Windows user would be right-clicking.
I use the keyboard much more frequently when using a Mac than I do with Windows.
Albuquerque PC
Why yes! I recently upgraded to one of those spiffy new keyboards with an 'enter' key. Hex keypads are out, I tell you! This is the wave of the future.
Awhile ago, I bought a Fingerworks Keyboard. These things use a heat-sensing technology to allow the same surface to detect gestures, button presses, and mousing without any "pushing" required. Contact is all it takes.
It's pretty slick, and it really helps me when I'm doing somethign that requires alot of transitioning from mouse to keyboard. It also adds gesturing to any application, which is pretty damn slick. Gestures can be even faster than keyboard input.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Basically the question of keyboard vs mouse comes down to analog vs. digital. We use a keyboard to type characters because, for a computer, they are digital; there's no ascii code for "C that's looks kinda like a G". We use a mouse to do graphic art because a brush stroke is not a simple line. We use the keyboard to go forward and strafe in a FPS because it's either full-on or not, but a mouse for aiming since rate of rotation is continuously variable.
What's the debate going to be about? :)
Less is more.
I had a long comment about "where and when," but I think this table is a better idea:
Mouse,trackball multi-avatar navigation Tablet Graphics Design/spatial data entry Keyboard All other forms of data entry Gamepad,joystick navigating when you have only one avatar(as in games)
I'd say that a mouse is seldom the right tool for the right job. You can't even really do all the browsing stuff with a mouse, as it often involves some other form of data entry. Further, since clicking is so very primitive in a web environment, the rudimentary clicking that a tablet is capable of makes it just about as good for exactly what mice are used for most (browsing).
It's a hybrid that'll get you by.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Here is an extremely quick, and extremely dirty analysis of how much data each method can input.
Ignoring simulatneous key presses (trust me, the number will be enormous even without them), the average workplace typer can achieve 50 wpm (http://www.testedok.com/typingtest.html). At 5 characters per word (same site), that comes to 250 characters per minute, or 4.17 per second. With a set of characters including the alphabet (26), punctuation (11), numbers (10), we have
(26+11+10)^4.17 = 9,389,621 distinct inputs possible per second
The mouse input question is significantly more difficult. One possible approximation of data input is clicking on distinct points on the screen. Just by playing around with a mouse, I believe I can hit any point on a 250x250 grid on the screen each second. I can mark that point with, say, 1 of 3 distinct button presses.
(250*250*3)^1 = 187,500
Keyboard wins by 50 times, apparently.
One can pretty quickly see, though, that no human can possibly generate this much data. Typing words at that rate is using no where near the complete set of possible data, and I can't imagine any useful situation where a person could be click ing on one of 187,500 points every second...
Apple-raised interface theorist, Bruce Tognazzini, http://www.asktog.com/ believes (and claims to have tested and proved) that keyboard-based, chording shortcut users engage in a momentary lapse of consciousness in which they recall and then position their hands for the keystroke, and that although they *think* they're faster than a mouse, they're not. /V) result in solid productivity gains. ... delete that word." Or the other half of the joke, where people poke their head over a cubicle wall and shout a command like "format c: yes i am sure".
See his 1991 book "Tog on Interface", where he claims in the 80s Apple performed $50M in tests that showed that people consistently reported believing that keyboarding (using shortcuts, etc.) was faster than mousing, yet the stopwatch consistently showed that mousing was faster than keyboarding.
His explanation for this is that deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function, and that this decision is not only boring, but that the user experiences near-amnesia in the approximately two seconds needed to remember the chord keystroke. On the other hand, Tog also argues that two-handed chords (think the handy cut-and-paste CTRL/C
Around page 180, where in fact he discusses Raskin's Cat interface and the decision to use a single dedicated key for operations such as "Find", Tog admits was actually fifty times faster than the Mac's mouse-move.
This reminds me of the old joke about voice interface word processors: "Up, up, up, left, left, left, left, no right, stop, yes, right
there
Want to learn something? Go Google "therbligs".
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
Executive Summary: The mouse is faster than the keyboard.
Or not.
Here is the article where Tognazzini describes his test. Tognazzini writes:
Note, "cursor keys", not "keyboard".
Never mind the absurdity of reporting the times to four significant digits. He said, again, "cursor keys", not "keyboard". He had the users move the text cursor with the arrow keys alone, from one "|" to the next.
Here's another way to do it, using the keyboard. Got your stopwatch?
?^$?;//s/|/e/gSix seconds, independent of the length of the paragraph or number of changes. (That's ed(1); "ed is the standard text editor".)
Even if you constrain the user to move the cursor to each "|", one by one, the keyboard is faster: for instance, in vi(1), "{/|^[re" and then repeat "n." But why would you make the user do that? That's not just ignoring the utility of the keyboard, but of the computer itself. So the mouse is faster than the arrow keys at performing task X forty-two times? If you use the computer as a fucking computer instead of crippling it to the level of a typewriter, then you don't do it forty-two times; you do it once. Tognazzini's test suffers from Mac System 6 tunnel vision.
It might be argued that automated repetition defeats the true purpose of the test -- that it isn't about replacing "|" with "e" forty-two times, that that isn't a real-world editing task but just a stand-in for forty-two different tasks.
Better for the keyboard! A keyboard does have keys other than arrow keys -- it has keys that bear the very same characters that appear in text. There is an obvious correspondence between a character on the keyboard and a character in the document, one about as "intuitive" as you can get. This lets the user press the keys to locate the corresponding character in the document, either individually, or sequentially to magically form composites we call "words" that have meaning within the user's task.
Using the keyboard, the user can have the computer find the correct location, rather than being forced to do it himself, visually, with the possibility of error. What if Tognazzini's test had not involved finding the vertical bars, which are visually distinctive in text, but, say, replacing "blue" with "green" throughout a ten-page document? How many instances would have been missed? Do you want to cut the blue wire, or the green one? Are you sure?
(Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say "|" was visually distinctive? Here you are, user: take your mouse and change every "|" in this Helvetica paragraph. Don't touch any "I" or "l" or "1", though.)
The mouse ignores the semantic content of the characters and symbols, words and keywords, blocks and sentences.... It even ignores the symbols themselves; it wanders haphazardly over a picture of the document (a static picture, if you're lucky; ever try using a mouse to select something that doesn't hold still because the window is being written to?)
Revised Executive Summary: The mouse is faster than the keyboard that has nothing but four arrow keys, when errors don't matter.
... to the opinions of people who use words like 'mouses' ?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
wtf. Getting moderated as a troll for presenting actual facts?